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Her voice caught in her throat, seized into silence as she watched his eyes dilate, the pinprick of fear at their core expanding, consuming the green of his irises until nothing remained.
Nothing except for two black coin-size holes.
She felt a tremble start all over. She reached for him but stopped short as black-to-purple wisps of cloudlike ink, like a thousand crawling insects, whispered out from behind his shoulders. The darkness surrounded him, growing thicker, clamoring to take hold of him, like the unlimited tentacles of some formless wraith. The wisps wrapped his shoulders, his arms.
A pair of blindingly white hands emerged from within the churning void. Like talons, they clung to his chest. A woman’s white face appeared in a flash over his shoulder—her eyes two empty sockets.
Panicked, Isobel reached for him. She caught his arm, and for a moment they held each other tightly.
“Find the door,” he said. Then he let go.
“No!”
With a hiss of shadows he fell backward, into the open wound of darkness. His arm slipped from her hands despite her desperate fight to keep hold, and then the blackness folded over him, swallowing him, knitting together until it was gone and he with it.
“Varen!”
She rushed through the space that had taken him. She reached the wall, pressed her hands flat to the wood, beating, shouting. “Varen!”
She swung around, searching the room with her eyes. The light overhead continued to sway. Back and forth. Back and forth. Breathing hard, her heart thundering, she watched it, watched it as though, with its next pass, it would bring him back.
She ran to the center of the room and turned in a full circle. She stopped, but around her, the room continued to spin. It turned and turned, revolving faster and faster until everything smeared and streaked into a blur. The light. The laughter. The voices and music. Her legs weakened. Dizziness overtook her. Her body gave in and her knees hit the floor. The room whirred faster. Nausea crept over her. She lowered her head, shut her eyes, and pressed her hands over her ears to block it out.
“Stop!” she said, then screamed, “Stop!”
A quiet click noise, like the unlatching of a door, broke through her consciousness.
Isobel looked up.
The room had ceased to spin. Before her, the door stood cracked open. Light shone in—a dim crimson glow. Through the crack, Isobel saw plush ebony carpeting and the corner of thick black draperies.
“Come, let us go,” she heard a man say, his accented voice rising over the drone of talk and distant shrill laughter. Small bells jangled.
“Whither?” another man asked.
“To your vaults.”
The scent of cinnamon, freshly baked bread, and spiced meat seeped through the door, causing her stomach to clench. She remained motionless, listening, battling the urge to throw up.
When she thought she could, Isobel stood. Shakily she drifted toward the door. She reached an unsteady hand to the knob. The door opened outward, opposite from before, and it moved easily, seemingly more from her touch alone than from any effort on her part to push.
The music washed over her, building and falling, the melody mimicking itself, then starting over again. A chamber of rich ebony lay stretched out before her. Thick velvet draperies spilled from tall windows, like motionless black waterfalls. Phantasmal light played through the stained-glass bloodred panes, setting shadows loose to clamor over the sable walls and coal black carpeting.
“The vaults are insufferably damp,” one of the men’s voices said. “They are encrusted with niter.”
“Let us go, nevertheless,” the other voice returned, and Isobel recognized his accent as Italian. The bells on his cap jangled again, and the sound drew her out of the office.
She kept one hand on the door frame as she passed into the room where the smell of perfume and wine mingled with the scent of rich food. She looked up and noticed more black draperies. They hung suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Combined with the deep crimson windows, the space seemed like the innermost chamber of a royal crypt.
But where had the warehouse gone? The goths and the Grim Facade? And why did this place seem so familiar?
“The cold is merely nothing. Amontillado! You have been imposed upon. And as for Luchesi, he cannot distinguish Sherry from Amontillado.”
The two men stood just within the doorway opposite her own, one at the far end of the otherwise empty room, their silhouettes surrounded by a haze of dim violet light. Who were they? What were they talking about? And where was she?
The bell-capped figure took the arm of the other. Then that man raised a mask to his face. He drew his cloak in tighter and they hurried off.
Isobel crept forward, toward the archway where they’d stood.
